Just as a general rule I'd suggest making sure the monitors and screen resolutions are the same for ensure maximum stability.

I have seen rare cases of crashes with MetaStock on some multiple monitor setups. However, most of the time it should work fine. I am not sure if this is due to drivers or some other type of conflict but a resolution has not been found in those rare cases.

MetaStock has a View-->Full Desktop menu command that will instantly put MetaStock across all monitors.

You can also stretch MetaStock (when it is not maximized) across a number of monitors of your choice, leaving the remaining monitors for any other applications you'd like to use (i.e. QuoteCenter).

In the few problem cases we've encountered, it did not seem to be specific to any particular video card manufacturer, so I would just go with whichever card meets your monitor needs.

Running Metastock Pro for example, across mutiple screens with a different stock on each screen is no problem at all. You have to watch the loading on the PC however due to the type of chart your running. If you run tick charts for all charts you might end up seeing an alert indicating that Metastock Pro can't update the charts fast enough. If that's your intention you may have some work to do in order to fine tune your PC for faster data handling. If your running 1 minute charts, or larger time frame I don't believe that will be an issue. Looking at the ATI card you indicated, I believe that it will only run 2 screens. Does that mean that your intending to install 4 video cards? You might want to look at ATI's and Nvidia's multimonitor cards. ATI has the FirePro Multi-View, while Nvidia has the NVS Quadro, which is what I use with four Samsung monitors. These cards are specifically designed to run multiple monitors (max 4) and unfortunately don't come cheap. You need to determine what card will meet your needs and then ensure that the driver is also available for your operating system. At this point you need to determine how the card will drive these monitors. The multi-monitor cards will all probably give you 4 DVI or 4 VGA outputs which will drive 4 monitors. However, the DVI and VGA maximum refresh rates off the card may be different. Don't be surprised to see this. So, to drive a given group of monitors at their maximum refresh rate you need to ensure that the card that you select will do that. If you attempt to do this with a card which is not specifically designed for multi-monitor operation, you will probably end up with a combination of DVI and VGA outputs which could give you different resolutions even though they are connected to the same monitor model. Eventually you will probably wish that you had bought a card which would give you consistent resolution across all screens.

I don't know about anyone else running multiple monitors and charts but I'd recommend doing this on a 64 bit processor with a 64 bit operating system. That is what I have been doing for the past two years or so, without problem. Maybe someone else can add comments on running multiple monitors and charts on a 32 bit system. Running Quotecenter simultaneously adds a communications and processing load as well depending on how many stocks your watching. This should also be a consideration in running a 32 or 64 bit system. Hope this helps

These threads were merged by wabbit [:D]

Hi [censored]al,

Regarding your time frames, you shouldn't have any problem running a simultaneous mixture of time frames, ranging from tick charts up to 1, 5 minutes, days etc.

I don't know if your going to build this PC yourself, so here's a few ideas to keep in mind.

Looking at your specs I'd say that the DDR3 memory will definitely be an asset. The M4A79T-Deluxe motherboard manual indicates that the board will hold up to 16Gb. You've indicated starting with 4GB but I would recommend 8GB if the budget can afford it. If you don't do that up front, consider planning for 2 sticks of 2GB each which leaves you with the capability of going to 8 GB without having to dispose of 4 X 1GB sticks. On my PC with 8 GB installed, Metastock's System report shows 8 GB installed with 6.3 GB Available Physical Memory. The motherboard supports memory overclocking which will also help improve system and program performance. Its worth experimenting with to increase the overall PC performance, just remember your trading off system performance for stability. 5 to 10 % overclocking is probably safe, without compromising system stability. Hopefully someone else in the forum can recommend safe overclocking settings.

You've indicated a 500Gb SATA drive. Without knowing what's available in India, consider obtaining the fastest hard drive available, and trade-off read / write speed for storage capability. Have a look at going to a 10k or 15K RPM hard drive or even a fast Solid State Drive instead of a standard 7200 RPM drive. If your going to use this PC primarily for the purpose of charting, to drive your trading decisions, speed and overall performance is probably more important than large storage capability. You should ensure that hard drive(s) that are installed have the 1.5Gbits jumper block removed, if in fact they are in place when the drives are installed. Some SATA II drives appear to be delivered with this jumper in place, and some don't. I have not found any rule which indicates which manufacture installs the jumper and which do not. In any case, the jumper is installed at the back of the drive and limits data transfer to 1.5Gbits/sec, instead of the 3GBits/sec that the drive and motherboard is rated to. This is a definite drag on performance. Here's a link to a Seagate page for the jumper configuration: http://www.seagate.com/w...VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD Follow the links on the page to see the drive jumper location and configuration.

Having indicated to you to consider a fast drive, you can also improve drive or, volume performance by eventually going to a RAID configuration with multiple hard drives. If this is a consideration, an important but understated item is found within the following Wikepedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/...e-Limited_Error_Recovery In a RAID array, the hard drives have a limited amount of time to report an error condition back to the RAID controller. If the drive doesn't have this capability, or this time is exceeded, or if the hard drive is busy sorting itself out instead of communicating with the controller, the RAID controller will flag the particular drive as having failed and will drop the drive out of the array, when in fact there really is nothing wrong with the drive. This will lead you to replacing the drive and rebuilding the array when there is nothing wrong with the drive. Different manufactures use different terms: Seagate uses the term "Error Recovery Control" on its Constallation and Barracuda ES Drives. Samsung and Hitachi apparently use the term "Command Completion Time Limit" while Western Digital uses Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) on its SATA 3.0 gB/S ***YS and ***YD drives. Here's a link to a samsung page with an explanation on it. "http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/learningresource/whitepapers/LearningResource_CCTL.html"
Here's a couple of links for Western Digital PDF files on the subject: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf
HTTP://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2178-001031.pdf


The hard drive type may not be a particular concern at the moment, but if your considering going to a RAID configuration in the future, the Error Recovery aspect and choice of a hard drive configured to to communicate error conditions back to the RAID controller can save you a considerable amount of time and grief from swapping hard drives and rebuilding arrays when there was nothing wrong with drive in the first place. I say this from recent experience after a software update for my RAID controller. Having reverted to an earlIer version of the controller software, I'm now more aware of the issues surrounding error control in a RAID array. Too bad I wasn't more aware of these issues at the beginning.

I had a look at the Nvidia (India) web site and they show the Nvida Quadro NVS 450 and 420, both of which support 4 monitors at resolutions of 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz. Here's the site link: http://www.nvidia.co.in/page/quadronvs.html If you can't find the ATI multimonitor card you might have better luck finding the Nvidia equivalent. According to the motherboard manual, if you use 4 VGA cards in the 4 PCIx16 slots, the PCI express operating mode drops down to x8 capability. If you use two cards in the blue PCI x16 slots, the PCI express operating mode stays at x16 capability. So your trade off will be the 4 ATI cards running at PCIx8 versus 2 Nvidia cards running at PCIx16. I'm not sure if you will notice the difference between either configuration.

Hope this helps

These type of thread scare some of the newbies, so I'd like to offer them support through this thread...

Every trader has their own particular needs and requirements, but I do begin to wonder at how "genuine" some of these needs and requirements are when I see threads like this regarding the computing technology "required" to trade.

If you think you need eight monitors to trade: the first question I'd ask myself is, "Why do I think that?" If you're only looking at timeframes not less than 5 minutes, surely it doesn't take five minutes to flick through six open charts? Is it REALLY necessary to have six charts simultaneously viewable? Maybe it is? Maybe it isn't? Have a good answer as to why.

Having massive disks and massive amounts of RAM is almost redundant when talking about MS. Even if you have a hundred charts open, that's still only about 2GB of RAM (or thereabouts) used by MS. So long as you don't have overly-complicated formulas (especially with recursive functions) and only load as much data on the open chart as your system requires to make its decisions, a much more "simple" computer will suffice in most instances. MS is not designed for parallel processing, regardless of how many cores you make available MS (like so many other applications) will still only utilise a single core, so some easy work done by the trader outside of MS will simplify the issue making everything perform better. If you're trading 5 minute charts, you probably don't need live bars enabled, so switch that off and only process completed bars instead of every tick. The chokepoint is still getting the data to MS.

As for the graphics; charts are essentially static objects so they put almost no load on a system. The difference between PCIe at 16x or 8x will be almost transparent -- you'd have be watching high quality video or playing some of the latest high-end video games to notice the difference. Your only concern should be whether the graphics cards could support the screen resolution for your monitors and your eyesight.

A consideration for having a multitude of monitors all showing you data is that by having too much information simultaneously available there is a very real possibility of information overload, or worse, analysis paralysis; either case will quantify for you the value of "too much information". There is a physical consideration too, spending hours in front of a massive monitor array will cause rapid-onset fatigue and depending on the physical configuration, eye strain, neck and shoulder muscle soreness. There are good reasons why a lot of the trading floors limit the screen real-estate viewable by the trader; their bosses don't want their traders to be away from theirs desks stretching their sore muscles or taking a break because they are fatigued or "mind-fried" when the markets suddenly move and they need to be at their stations to make rapid, rational decisions.

The things I would be more concerned about would be the data connections and power. I have travelled quite a bit through India and know that telecommunications and power there are anything but reliable. Running eight monitors will use an extraordinary amount of power and will require a kick-ass UPS to support them in the extremely-likely event of a prolonged power outage. Making a phone call in India can quite often be difficult at the best of times, so maintaining independent redundant internet/data connections would be the next problem to be investigated by the concerned trader.

I used to have three monitors on my main computer for my trading and another separate machine (sometimes with dual monitors) for my other computing needs. Some time ago I dropped off one of the monitors from the main computer and have virtually stopped using the other computer (so essentially I went from five monitors to two). Just about all of my work is now on one computer which has a dual core CPU and 3.2GB RAM (32bit OS) and fast disks in RAID (mainly for data processing outside of MetaStock as MS is not that disk intensive to be any real concern, as discussed above). During the day I will often have several data streams open; MS Pro RT through QC, QuoteCenter itself, a few sessions of MT4 through a few different brokers and maybe some demo datafeeds as well as the live data feeds, maybe a connection or two to TWS , all whilst streaming music (except when speaking to clients on VoIP) or maybe watching some videos and surfing the net when the markets are quiet. All this is coming through a single ADSL2+ connection which achieves an average throughput just below 10kbps. I have a wireless connection for a backup which could not support all of these bandwidth requirements, but in the event I need it, it would support my trading needs.

At the same time, I might be running my trading platforms, conducting some back-testing, doing some programming and some other general "stuff". There are a few times when having a quad-core could improve things for me, but for the most part the dual-core CPU is sufficient (it's mainly the backtesting which hogs the CPU resources). If you're not doing all of this then you probably wouldn't get that much advantage from increasing the number of CPU cores? The price difference these days isn't too bad, as is the case with RAM "get what you can afford" is commonly advised.

My recent experiences with a few traders is they think that having bleeding-edge technology and massive arrays of monitors proves they are great traders. In reality, they are just showing off; call it "[censored]envy" if you want. Their trading is not any better than someone trading on a much more simple computer (One of the better EOD traders I know doesn't use any computers, he still only uses the newspaper for his price data and a telephone to call his broker.) It is more likely to be the trader that generates trading success rather than the technology used; although some technology can assist the trader by making their life easier. Basic number crunching on a data stream where a new compute point is received every second or two is not really too much to handle for a modern computer; it hardly compares to modern 3D gaming where object rendering including light/shadow, sound and have physics have to be realistically modelled in real time for the main player, their network cohorts and all the other AI objects/characters.

I strongly believe the reliable flow of quality information and the connectivity to the broker are the most important factors for success; for many people, these can be achieved quite simply without massive technology and infrastructure expenditure.

In summary (and for those people new to trading and just finding their feet): most people don't need eight monitors and/or super-computers to be a good trader.


My $0.02


wabbit [:D]

We were recently in Delhi where there were frequent power outages. I still have a client there who more recently said that things had become worse since we left in February as the weather got hotter. I have another client in Kerala who experiences very frequent prolonged power outages. (Although none of these compare to Kathmandu, Nepal where, when we left there in January, they only had five hours of power per day; in more remote regions their grid supply (if they had one) was only energised for a few months of the year for few hours per day.)


Getting phone calls through by landline from some places in India during visits in 2006/7 and 2008/9 was problematic for us (but certainly not all towns/cities). I particularly remember trying to call out from Hampi was quite difficult, as was from another town in ??? (I think it might have been somewhere in Andhra Pradesh? It took many attempts over quite a few hours to get the call through.) On the flip side, we were in the middle of the Thar desert when the guide received calls on his mobile phone!

The underlying message is simple: no matter how reliable you think your communications link and power supply are, Murphy's Law "dictates" that one/both will fail at the time when you have maximum exposure to the markets and they are turning against you, so have a backup system or plan. Sometimes, Murphy will even simultaneously kill your redundant systems too. (Happened to me, and of course, it happened at the worst possible time when a power spike zapped through the grid, taking out the normal power and my UPS suicided to protect the downstream side, so there was no residual supply either.)



wabbit [:D]

Hi wabbit,

I agree there is some power issue in northern India.As fara as jaipur goes, i do not think making call is an issue from there .
Jaipur is my hometown.So, i can assure u that there is no issue , though u might face some if u use international roaming,but that 2 rare case.
Btw, agreed with Murphy's law......In trading, NOTHING IS FOR CERTAIN......